Description:
thin black lines arranged in a grid
Label Text:
Brice Marden’s prints, paintings, and drawings merge chance expression with methodical control. While his reductive visual language appears similar to that of his Minimalist contemporaries, he never completely abandoned the accidental or idiosyncratic gesture characteristic of the Abstract Expressionists. For this reason, he prefers the term “Romantic Minimalist.”
Although Marden began making prints as a graduate student at Yale University in the early 1960s, he was not seriously devoted to printmaking until about ten years later. In the 1970s, the artist discovered his affinity for the etching process through several brilliant collaborations with the master printer Kathan Brown at Crown Point Press in Oakland, CA. Marden found that etching allowed him to make intricate, serial investigations of linear and expressive mark-making, often through the manipulation of a grid composition.
In his second collaboration with Brown in 1973, Marden made these two Untitled prints from the Adriatics series, named after the Adriatic Sea between Italy and Greece. Divided laterally into two different grids which are reminiscent of nautical charts, these prints are intended to evoke the variation of weight and density of the sky and sea. They display Marden’s characteristic anxious lines, which are especially tense where his etching needle slipped or his sweater was imprinted on the plate, as on the right-hand side of the lower grid. Despite these subtle elements of chance expression, the overall quietude of Marden’s prints invite patient viewers into a meditative state similar to that induced by gazing at the sea.
Subjects:
Etching; Geometric patterns; lines (artistic concept) Link to share this object record:
https://museums.fivecolleges.edu/detail.php?t=objects&type=ext&id_number=SC+1978.10.2 |
